Dr. Najwa Mayer is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. 

Najwa’s areas of research and writing are broadly concerned with culture, capital, and social movements across Muslim and Asian diasporas; US empire and anti-imperial critique; critical refugee and critical militarism studies; Islam in the US; race and liberalism; and transnational feminisms.

She is working on two book projects: The first examines the unprecedented proliferation of “Muslim American” popular cultures within 21st-century War on Terror markets, theorizing their circulations—from counterextremism policing programs to social movements—through neoliberal relationships between racial, sexual, and secular politics. The second traces the supply chains of the War on Terror by following the geo-capitalist relationships between weapons, art, and refugee labor. Her research has received support from the Social Science Research Council, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and Henry Luce Foundation, among others.

She formerly held positions as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College (affiliations in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Leslie Center for Humanities), a Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar at Boston University (affiliations in Religion and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), and Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Her other professional histories include curatorial and teaching work in art museums as well as public education for youth-based organizations within the communities she comes from: refugee, immigrant, and working-class.

Najwa is currently co-chair of the SWANA Diaspora Studies Section of the Association for Asian American Studies and a host for the New Books Network podcast.